Haha I love the SSX series as well. SSX Tricky was the first game I ever owned on PS2 and my sister and I have probably worn the poor disc out due to overuse. With a few exceptions I always play as Eddie and she always picks Elise

If they make another I hope it's more like the classics. I was disappointed by this new one. It was fun at first but after a few weeks I was bored. I'm pretty much bored playing it now. Most of the tracks suck compared to old ones, there's no more halfpipe challenges. It's just not better than the old ones. The only thing I really like about it is the Bulldog level in New Zealand

EDIT: I also dislike the gear purchasing system. Why do I have to buy a crapton of shitty gear to get to the good stuff?

Stop it. Stop giving EA credit for a good game or a bad game. Hate them for forcing origin down our throats and requiring developers to.cram as much dlc down our throats as they can. EA is a publisher, they are responsible for virtually none of the games they release. Games come from developers like Bioware and such. This is why not all "EA Games" are bad - I enjoyed bioware's game. I did NOT enjoy getting booted out of it because EA's shitty content protection is a joke and kicks you whenever their servers choke - which is often. EA finds some of the best developers out there and forces them to comply with their bullshit rules in order to get published. But stop giving them credit for the games - the developers are the ones who designed, programmed, tested and released the game. If you like a game or hate a game, take it up with the developer, not the publisher.

When I discovered myself moving backwards in the queue on my favorite server, I decided that now that I've seen the Mass Effect series through to completion (redux endings are seriously awesome btw), it might finally be time to wash my hands of EA.

I feel the need to comment since that is not entirely EA's fault. If you look at Nintendo (NTDOF) and Sony (SNE) over the past year they too have fallen. This is due to the near end of this generations consoles. The new Wii has been announced and most likely by this time next year Sony and Microsoft will have new consoles at least announced as well and once new gen games start getting pumped out EA will undoubtedly rise. Now if you compare to activision (ATVI) and Microsoft (MSFT) they are still going strong. This can be attributed to activisions strong presence on the pc. Microsoft, being the pc giant they are, will rarely see a change in stock prices from fluctuations in the gaming economy anyway. Now, I'm sure if EA didn't have shitty customer service and screw up games they would be better off, but would still have the downward trend the gaming economy currently has.

To touch on this lightly. Correct, investors care about sales, quarterly gains, etc. I could go on a long rant about the correlation between customer service and the impact on sales, but to make it short: If word gets out that you sell a bad product or don't appreciate and support the customers you already have your sales will drop.

The graph is also misleading. I'm not going to go off and look at EA's past sales records (simply because I don't care that much), but the numbers do not start at 0, nor does the graph hold enough data to provide a long-term conclusion.

That site is terrible, I have so many questions, like when is it coming out? Is it already out? What does it look like? How is it different? I guess I'd have to register for their forums to get this basic info...

I for one hope that will EA crash and burn and take all their acquired puppets with them. Especially bioware. They have created nothing but trash since EA bought them. To go on from here would be to build on a terrible foundation. A cursed, rotten and demon-infested foundation.

I want EVERYTHING EA has ever touched to die. And then I want some of the brilliant individuals to rise from the ashes and start over again with the knowledge that bending over and taking that huge EA cock up their ass was the wrong move and that they should never do anything even remotely similar again.

I don't want their idiocy to be forgiven. I want it to be abundantly clear how massively they fucked up when they took that money and sold over their integrity. I want them to regret that for the rest of their lives so maybe, just maybe, in ten years we won't having a gaming industry that's as stagnant and "safe" as the current.

That's my dream. It's not going to come true but I will stick with it none the less.

EDIT: I stand corrected; Dragon Age: Origins was a great game. I do, however, not share the sentiment that ME3 was good. Sure, the ending was beyond terrible, but the rest of the game was not something I enjoyed either. It is however one of their least horrible productions since EA took over the reins. This is obviously 100% opinion. Can't really speak for anything else but my own views :)

Dragon Age: Origins was in development way, way before that purchase happened as far as I know. You can't change greater than five years momentum that quickly - as far as I am concerned DA:O is, and most likely will be, the last great 'Bioware that was' title.

Not everything that Bioware made was trash since they were bought by EA. Dragon age: Origins is one of the best RPG's made in the past 5, or so, years, imo. Though that is the last really good game they made since 2009.

I like to think that Bioware was already far enough along on DA:O when EA bought them that EA just let them do their thing for this one last game. Then the EA hammer came down and Bioware was lost forever.

Not to mention the first two Mass Effect games, they were great too. Mass Effect 3 clearly suffered from its ending, but the rest of the game was also fantastic (The Krogan and Quarian/Geth sections in ME3 are standouts in the entire series for me)

Dragon Age 2 was clearly released on too tight a schedule, and it's not like they did nothing wrong with it, it was stable, relatively bug-free and didn't have horrible performance and there were some good ideas in its plot, executed poorly, but they were there.

The Old Republic is pretty much what they said it would be, if you didn't buy into the hype in the leadup to its release. It's pretty astounding on one level for an entire MMO to be voice-acted and the game itself is fairly solid, but it's nowhere near as "revolutionary" as the marketing would have you believe - but then you'd be guilty of believing marketing, which is always a recipe for disappointment.

Note that I didn't say that DA2 or SWtOR were great or even (in the case of the former) good games, just pointing out that there are some good elements in them that gives me hope that "Old BioWare" isn't completely dead.

DA: O was a great game, and I was surprised to see EA let them work on it for like 4-5 years to perfect the game. They then turned around and had them finish Dragon Age 2 in like a year and a half, which mostly explains the recycled content and dumbed down gameplay.

It's entirely normal for stocks to dip like this and to then rally later. You can look at plenty of companies histories and many have suffered drops much worse than this and still made it out just fine.

EA simply isn't losing money from things like premium, fucked queues, and ignoring cheaters. Buying premium is close to 100% profit for them and then problems with Battlefield don't matter because millions of people already bought the game. Do you think that because they ignore cheaters or sell premium that money is being sucked right out of their bank account?

This graph more likely indicates problems with management internally and isn't a clear indicator that EA is on life support or doomed to die.

Shhh, don't interrupt their circlejerk with information, or gods forbid, the whole picture. A glance at Take Two who is a generally well regarded studio with a lot of r/gaming circlejerk approved IP reveals that the fall has been industrywide.

This isn't about customer service, or DLC, or a bad ME3 ending or whatever. It's a strictly money game. Investors don't want to invest in EA or Take Two, or Activision, because AAA game budgets are titanic in size, and after all that, there's still no guarantee on if the game will come out on time (meaning the date of promise on return on investment is highly suspect), or that it will be any good. Add to that, it's not uncommon to sink millions of dollars into a game, have it receive critical acclaim, and still not sell well. Now add in the multimillion dollar marketing budgets, post-release support staff costs (patches, community managers, etc.) and we as a gaming audience tending towards being rather fickle and it's not a surprise at all:

Investing in gaming is a highly risky proposition, and most financial planners will steer you elsewhere.

Also, this graph is cropped to make it seem FAR more drastic than it is. THat's not zero at the bottom, that's 11.5. At the top, that's 21.5. Over the course of this timeline, EA's share price has dropped by 50%, not the 95% this graph makes it look like.

I had to whip out my calculator, but that puts at 1.4 billion pirated copies of Mass Effect... I say... we must make more DLCs. Announce them before the release and include lots and lots of pre-order bonuses...

Hell... how about... Pre-order a year ahead and get an exclusive chance to play the first half of the campaign. The 2nd part is in the DLC.

Just to blow your mind further...nope. Common wisdom for the wholesale price of a game (what your FLGS pays to put it on their shelf, and what EA actually sees) is $10. That's 8.5 billion pirated copies, or 1.25 for every person on the planet!

Suddenly, those mega-blockbusters with $60-$80M development budgets with another $50M in marketing looks a lot more like an outlandish overspend, no?

Poe's law, dude. You have to put some sort of notice in there or go too overboard for it to be true. Just doing the same math that anti-piracy groups do is not enough to make it obvious you aren't "one of them".

Not to mention just because a game is initially pirated doesn't mean it isn't later purchased. I would say I purchase roughly 40% of the games I "pirate".

Bastion, Minecraft, Portal, Borderlands, Skyrim, Fallout3/NewVegas and Terraria all pirated by me and worthy of the retail purchases that followed. Make a good game, and people will fucking pay for it!

Same. Counter-Strike, Warcraft3, Half-life2, Minecraft, Starcraft were all pirated... and now in the past 10 years I purchased every possible Valve product, sometimes twice and more as gifts, I convinced people to buy Minecraft, introduced them to competitive side of Starcraft, paid Blizzard for 5 years of WoW subscription...

And all of that happened because in early stage of my gaming/childhood I pirated games and was introduced to really good franchises that did not disappoint me through the years. Unlike Need for Speed franchise... Or Battlefield... Or Call of Duty... or CnC...

I read an article a few weeks back that said a host of problems but a lot of it had to do with Star wars: The Old Republic because they had a lot riding on that and investors were amped about it and at the first sniff of trouble, everyone was like "WELP FUCK THAT" and sold their shares. Investors are scared of video games anyway... they are always trying to catch lightning in a bottle with with studios and publishers that are trying to mimic the success for World of Warcraft which is downright impossible. EA was publishing titles that tried to copy instead of innovate and investors left that shit in a hurry. At least... that's my take.

So investors are just as naive as those mmo players who always think their new mmo is going to be the next WOW? Well then I should be a friggen market analyst because I'm pretty sure I have a firmer grasp of reality in that area.

Investors are scared of video games? Are you kidding me? Electronic arts has a share price-to-earnings ratio of 57. Zynga doesn't even have a price-to-earnings ratio, because it's never made any money. Just as some comparison, Apple has a P/E ratio of 15 and Wells Fargo around 12. EA's stock is dropping because investors had incredibly high expectations of it.

I'm sure a majority of investors don't even play video games. They just see the money Modern Warfare has made as a franchise and think "durr hurr I want those millions too". As a response these big companies will hire marketing execs, more people who don't actually play games, to run the show instead of programmers and artists. That's when a franchise begins to dip because it gets turned into a household product instead of a fun form of entertainment.

Valve has the smart sense to be run by game makers who understand what gamers want and how to properly market to them. Although I guess not having to answer to stock holders gives them a huge advantage as well.

Spot on. I bet you are exactly right. Its like when Curt Shilling made his game studio, he hired a shit ton of artists and creative developers and no experienced programmers and he just stood in front of everyone and threw stacks of $100 bills at his workers and he said, "Make a game..."

38 Studios presents Kingdom of Amaluer. Investors say, GREAT SCOTT THIS IS GOING TO BE GREAT! ITS LIKE WoW! Reality sets in that is is a shitty game and everything sucks about it and investors jumped off a cliff trying to get away...

But what's changed otherwise? 5 years ago, online passes and day 1 DLC weren't industry standard practices. Now, EA have the most aggressive content restriction of any major publisher and they are suffering for it. Activision don't do it nearly as much, there is COD Elite, but all in all you don't see nearly as much complaints levied at them as you see for EA.

5 years ago the Xbox 360 wasn't even 2 years old. The Wii and PS3 weren't even 1 year old. The console cycle has a HUGE effect on the financials of the video game industry. And that's just one easily-observable factor that has changed in the last 5 years.

Actually, a lot of people thinks that the stock prices of EA are currently undervalued. Adding to that, there's a lot that oldee investors don't understand about video games and how they are slowly transitioning into a different phase. Most of them still understand video gaming as sitting at home, and waiting for the next product to come out, but in actuality, a lot of games are being pumped out on the mobile front that's actually making money via "add-on packs" or something. It's not that there's no money to be made selling PC/console games, but the winds have blown the other direction in addition to how we used to game. Investors are dead set that EA has to make these triple-A titles, ship them, and then make record selling numbers through them. It's just not how it works anymore, and the numbers aren't reflecting it so people lose faith in EA stocks.

I'm not saying EA is making great games or anything about their business ethics and so forth, but I'm just putting forth some view points that investors could have.

all this tells me is i should buy up some EA stock ... the video game industry took a bit longer to show decline than the rest of the market, but with the lull in a new generation of gaming consoles sales across the board are down -- if it dips below $10 i might dump quite a bit into EA

The developers wouldn't disappear, they'd probably be bought out by other companies/studios or they'd go back to their original studios. Their production values might go down a bit (in terms of artwork) but we might see more risk taking.

It won't go on like this forever. Pretty soon the stocks will be low enough that one of these two things will happen: either the shareholders show Riccitiello the door and replace him with someone that can do a better job (rumors say that it might be the current head of EA Sports), or the shares become so stupidly cheap that some bigger company buys off EA (the usual suspect would be Disney).

Door #3, Riccitiello fixes all the problems on his own and the company gets back afloat. But i can't really imagine this happening.

With the abundance of indie studios trying new things and development models like kickstarter, the need for big guys is diminishing quickly. EA has hurt gaming, they have made it worse and the money that goes to them could be going to another company that would be doing a better job. I would have no issues for a company that seems to care nothing about the actual gaming community to go under. There is a reason there stock is tanking, they are doing a shitty job overall.

Although the overriding factors in EA's valuation collapse are internal, it's important to look at wider factors within the industry as well - because the reality is that this is not a situation that's confined to EA. Many games publishers face a tough transition, not merely to next-gen console hardware next year (which is tough enough in itself), but also to a world of new business models and new competitors. Several of them probably won't make it unscathed, and the stock market knows it.

God dammit r/gaming, I hate EA as much as the next guy but their stock valuation (especially over the relatively short window graphed here) is not some result of their being a dickhead to you, and this shows a woeful lack of understanding in how the market works.

Large name studios are struggling mightily because of the investment model required to produce a multiplatform AAA gaming title these days, and it makes a lot of investors understandably nervous. You have to shell out a quarter billion dollars for production costs, and then easily another hundred plus million in marketing costs, and the game could still tank?

Yeah I'm not sure that's the safest bet either. Activision has managed to weather the storm with decently reliable recurring income in the CoD franchise and WoW subscriptions, but take a look at Take Two Interactive. Red Dead, Civ, Borderlands, BioShock and GTA are generally much more beloved IPs than anything EA has to offer, and TT is doing worse than EA, by a considerable margin.

You are forced to pay to access online if you have not bought a brand new copy of the game, then have to pay more for a server.
Buying a server is not demanded for you if other people have but if they stopped paying, how are you going to play without EA's servers? You have to pay.
Plus this is all on top of Xbox Live for Xbox 360 users. Money, money, money.

I'm pretty sure the guy meant the fact you can only rent a Battlefield 3 server, you can't host one. EA holds a monopoly over the hosting market, which means the death of modding scene, LAN gaming and private game sessions with friends in general.

It's a shame, vanilla Battlefield 2 was crap compared to Project Reality, Forgotten Hope and Point of Existence. The modding community made more content and variety than DICE ever could.

Many DICE employees have background in modding and the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 defined many features of Battlefield 2.

Frostbite 2.0 seems like a fantastic engine and looking at the new Armored Kill trailer just makes me rage about the fact it will be Quake with vehicles, instead of a teamwork-oriented war game the community could make it to be.

There's of course ARMA3 and EA doesn't have it's dirty pawns on that, so it will be everything Battlefield 3 isn't, but having more than one war game wouldn't hurt.

no one likes the rented servers EA have on pc, what the FUCK have you been smoking?

people like to be able to run their own servers, and have full control of them, not be forced into hiring a server from a EA accepted serverhost and then have minimal amount of configuration available.

I don care about custom servers, I just wish there was a way to avoid them, I want to play a game that doesnt allow crazy amoounts of tickets, its fun but its completely exhausting, I played a game for n hour, one of my favourite online games I've ever played but by the end I was worn out and could not go another match.

Plus they stopped hosting their own servers to be cheap and get more money, after a backlash they did put some of their own up but its still incredibly hard to get into a game on a server without stupid rules.

I'm sure there is more to the story. I'd love to know that they are failing despite pushing microtransactions, DRM, online connectivity and other such bullshit into gaming, but I highly doubt it is happening.

I dunno why, Diablo 3 was fun, and well made, even though it had it's flaws and issues. The biggest issue is that it tried to be something it shouldn't have, but it's fairly easy to sink 20 hours into it, and a lot of games are much shorter than that nowadays... (unfortunately)

Metacritic users were devestating to Diablo 3. Most of them are on the accesability around launch, with servers going down and the trouble logging on. I don't quite feel that this warrented a score of 1.

After all, there are plenty of other things we can point and shout at when it comes to Diablo 3. It was a fun month of playing it, but I don't see myself coming back soon.

I think companies are going to learn that with tools like Metacritic around, they need to have their shit ready and playable ON release day, not around it.

I'm not saying this is right, but think about it: when all of the excited Diablo fanboys(not an insult, here) get on and they can't play the game they've been salivating over for the past forever, what else are they going to do? I bet you a ton of them went straight over to Metacritic and threw up a bad review. If this shit had been sorted on the first day, I bet you 90% of those negative reviewers would have been too engrossed in D3 to review it.

Now that it has the bad rap, I don't think it can really make a comeback, just like Battlefield 3. Combine that with the fact that Blizzard did everything they could to remove alternative gameplay styles and funnel players into the RMAH, and have yet to add PvP, and you really have a shitstorm.

With great power comes great responsibility. If they couldn't make D3 blow D2 out of the water, they shouldn't have tried at all.

I think your final point is silly, and am generally a D3 defender (though... I haven't played it in a month... um...) But I think metacritic does way more damage than good. Look at the glowing critic reviews for ME3, which was the equivalent of your best friend coming a taking a shit in your pillow.

To be honest, I am kind of surprised to see civilization V up there. I can understand diablo III, but everyone who I have introduced into civilization have nothing but good experiences with it, besides it being hours of game play to finish a part of it.

Well, yesterday I first played some Civ 5 and then a game of Civ 4 with my friends online.

Sure, Civ 5 is simplified, but I think it is in a good way. Civ 4's religion mechanic clutters your build list with six (?) different temples and monasteries, for example.

Several thinks that came to mind:
- I prefer the hexagon and NON-stacking units over the old way
- Units can embark by themselves on water, instead of you having to build carriages and then micromanage them

"Staying honest to the series" is an argument I will never understand. Game developers need to go bravely where no one has ever gone before, and yearly updates EA Sports-style.. nah.

In 10 years there will be remakes and Kickstarters and whatever, so then you'll get the "old game, but with improved graphics and interface".

I am sorry I had no idea. I never played civ 4 or the others, I was just introduced to civ 5 and never quite played a strategy game like it. I was going from a fast paced game like starcraft to a think tank game like civ.

I dunno, myself and a lot of others I have don't think Civ5 was up to scratch. I only came in on civ4 (though I did play some civ 2 when I was young), and played a TONNE of it, it was addictive and fun, and you could get through an epic length game quickly and easily.

Civ5 for me is really bleh, it has really slowed down the game, and no matter how many times I've tried to get into it (maybe finished 2 games and half finished a few more), I just can't.

People were expecting a 1000-hour game like diablo 2, LoD. I think patches and expansions will improve the game, but still to many it felt like a WoW-Diablo fusion rather than a successor to Diablo 2, in large part because all the Diablo 2 developers had all left Blizzard.

I've heard that it was originally intended to be more of a mmo then they changed it to be more like diablo 2. What they got was a mediocre single player game which requires an internet connection to play (and requires their servers to be working correctly). A slightly better co-op game mainly because requireing an internet connection for that is justified. And a really good in-game stock market basically.

It seems to have been developed around the auction house instead of around the game itself. It's made so you have to use the auction house, which in time might lead to you using real money. The zynga model. It's FarmVille from Blizzard. The game is not bad, its the model, it's a model that generates revenues, for now, yes. But it's the dark side of game development. Sell skins and stuff like that maybe. But earn things in game from playing, not from real money.

This is actually the most legitimate critique I've heard of the game. You need the auction house to advance into Hell and Inferno, and that just isn't fun. HOWEVER. I think people would be just as mad if it was really easy to get that type of gear in-game. The auction house lets it circle around more easily, go from the people who don't need it to the people who do. They could, and should in my mind, give better rewards for grinding already-defeated bosses so that it was less necessary.

Oh man everyone raged at me for not buying into the whole Battlefield3: Premium junk, "Lol your mom won't buy it for you?" "Sorry you're too poor to buy it kid".
Mmmkay so I don't want to invest yet another $50 with the promise that the content they make will be worth it and not broken as it was for nearly six months? I Think I'll pass. An of course Battlefield 4 beta on then next MOH game was announced already. I'd rather put money into the Steam sale an get something I know has some value.

I generally don't game anymore but was very excited to hear about a new release of SimCity. However the platform on which it is offered makes that a no-go. I want to buy a copy and know I can play it offline when I'm on vacation and I will never use Origin. So although I would not be a big spender with them it is an example of a lost sale to a potentially enthusiastic customer. Not saying it is related to the stock tanking, just sayin' in general about the pushing away of customers...

While this is a striking fall, it is not as severe as the graph suggests. The value has actually dropped ony ~50% over the time frame displayed, whereas the graph is set up to imply a tremendous loss closer to %99.

Wow, look, up almost $1 since this post. Stock prices fluctuate and often have nothing to do with the things r/reddit compains about. It's been down partly because they had less subscriptions to SWTOR than anticipated, and now it's getting a small bump because they had layoffs.

Regardless of what people say, EA employs a lot of talented developers. If they go under, some of those developers may find jobs, but many people will be out of luck. Don't just assume "Oh, it's Bioware, someone else will just hire all the devs if they are laid off".

"well guys do you see this stock? this is bad we need a quick fix..hmmm... ARE YOU GUYS THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING?"

everyone all together:"close bioware, make more DLC, completely change knights of the old republic to free, but make everything cost money, more day1 dlc." The video game community will surely love us.

Yay, a company that we disagree with on some points is failing, leading to the potential loss of hundreds of jobs in the industry as well as a large mess of an issue sorting out IPs owned by that company! How great! This really is exciting news for the industry!